Week 36 Arica

Nov 16, 2015

So this week was a good one. We had several lessons with investigators and also had another noche de hogar con la familia Julca (Family home evening). It was so fun and I made banana bread for them to try! The dad, Alfredo ate like all of it haha. This family is from Peru and they are the most humble people I’ve ever met. He is extremely honest and wants to be baptized right now haha. The only problem is that he has to get married and in order to do so, he needs a Chilean carnet (Identification card) and he doesn’t have one and neither can he get one with the registro civil closed like it is. This family is really just waiting to get baptized and it is driving me nuts! We also have another investigator that is just waiting to get married. We have another family that will get baptized after the dad has his surgery to get his hernia taken out. Right now he is in a lot of pain and cant even come to church yet but we will baptize them when he is better. We also have been teaching some younger kids named Javier and Mikaela. Their older brother and sister got baptized and now they want to be baptized but the older sister stopped going to church so now they have no one of the age of 18 or older to be there support. Now we have to work through the ward to see what we can do to insure that they will stay active in the church. Javier has grown very attached to me and made me promise that I would baptize him before I leave Arica. I told him I would. He also wants to be a missionary someday and he’s only 12! I really hope the ward council decides to let us baptize them because I can see him being a leader in the church someday. We are constantly finding new people to teach but some of them haven’t been progressing so we have been trying to focus more on finding the people that are prepared by the lord. I know that this work truly is the single most important work in this world. Elder Francis and I have been learning so much as a companionship and we will have success as long as we are obedient. We organized a few plans of how we can have success. On another note, we were walking one day and we passed an older man sitting in the middle of the road. I said hello, good afternoon to him and he just gave us a scowling look and ignored us. Then, as we were walking away, he chucked a metal pole at us! hahaha I couldn’t believe it! My first near death experience! Just kidding haha it just hit the ground behind us and we kept walking without looking back. Also, we talked to two drunken men in the street and one of them was kind of a gansta and halfway through the conversation, his friend asked him what he had in his pants and reached down and pulled out a giant kitchen knife! His friend started laughing at him and kept asking why he was walking around with a knife. He then chucked it over the fence. So that was our second near death experience. Also, we talked to another guy that said we were spies from the US and then he started calling us aliens.... I love Chile... haha. Arica is truly an amazing place and there are so many prepared people here to hear the gospel. Just gotta find em! Also, we went and saw the world’s oldest mummies today! It was really cool and here are some pics! 

Love you all!

Elder Spanbauer